Free Summertime by Raffaella Barker Page A

breath and staringblankly at windows bursting with colour – neon-blue dresses with pink roses sprigged across the skirt, lilac cardigans with sea-green beading, all the same and all trumpeting their individuality. Every shopfront has three or four mannequins in uniform of slithery dress, cardigan and tiny handbag, and every shop window has a flutter of words daubed above or beneath the clothes, a marketing message to the subconscious, a version of
Stand out in a crowd, be yourself
.
    How can they all be such sheep? Even though I have been looking forward to this stolen day of indulgence with secret, guilty longing, I find my interest in making a purchase confounded, and decide that the National Portrait Gallery will raise the tone and put me in a more celestial frame of mind. However, I arrive in Trafalgar Square, to find a queue chicaning impenetrably towards a far distant ticket booth. Much of the queue is made up of elderly couples; women with crisply set grey hair, men restless, with the
Telegraph
folded under an arm and highly polished brown brogues.
    â€˜It’ll be another hour before we’re even inside the building,’ sighs a matron with a quilted jacket and a scarf emblazoned with Scottie dogs. ‘It’s because the exhibition closes tomorrow. We’ll have to stay, but I’m afraid we’ll never make it to Peter Jones at this rate.’
    Her husband sighs, thwacking his newspaper against his hand.
    â€˜Well you did insist on coming, Marjorie. I said it was madness.’
    Marjorie pulls her lips tightly in around her teeth in a disgruntled sigh, and adjusts her position so she is looking away from her husband. They are a picture of crossness.
    I stand around for a few minutes, pretending to be in a welter of indecision and even put myself at the back of the queue to see what it feels like. It feels terrible: maddening and achingly boring. I have no intention of joining it. I never have had. Wander off, sideways like a crab, hardly able to admit to myself that my first attempt to see art for several years has been so easily thwarted. Once I reach a safe distance, I scuttle away, disliking to admit a degree of relief, even though I really wanted to see the exhibition, and wondering if many people are as shallow as I am.
    However, simply cannot bear to have such a total absence of moral or cultural fibre, and turn back once more to hurl myself in through the main doors of the National Gallery, bypassing the special exhibitions, for an hour with Piero della Francesca and his contemporaries. The relief of being among these paintings is as powerful to me as a session in theconfessional would be to a Catholic, and I return to the street renewed, walking on air and determined to know more about art.
    Reach Rose’s flat at seven o’clock, and find her grinding carrots and beetroot into a health-giving drink. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it,’ she shudders. ‘Tristan gave me a total detox programme as a birthday present. I think he must have a mistress who has put him up to it, or else he’s developed a really vile and worrying streak of sadism. I’m on day three. I have to go and be colonically irrigated every afternoon for a week, and the irrigation man is really good-looking, which makes it double-embarrassing, and we can see the gunk as it comes out and we talk about it. The story of my life is being revealed through poo, it’s just awful.’
    Rose cannot come to the hen night because of the demands of the detox programme. ‘I’d love to,’ she says longingly, looking at her timetable, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got to have a shower at nine o’clock, followed by a body brush and another lot of disgusting powders at ten-fifteen. I’ve also got to drink two gallons of distilled water between now and bedtime and fill in my progress chart, and I haven’t even taken the powders before the last ones yet.’
    â€˜Well,